The Comfort of Strangers

Social Life and Literary Form

Gage McWeeny

Provides a strikingly original and compelling new account of the Victorian and early modernist novel
Takes as its central focus the ephemeral forms of attachment instanced by strangers that have been largely ignored by critics
Engages with how literature emerges over the course of the nineteenth century as a formalizing activity often indistinguishable from the sense-making work of the new social sciences
Discusses work by Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and others

The Comfort of Strangers

Social Life and Literary Form

Gage McWeeny

Description

In most accounts, literature of the nineteenth century compulsively tells the story of the individual and interiority. But amidst the newly dense social landscapes of modernity, with London as the first city of one million inhabitants, this literature also sought to represent those unknown and unmet: strangers. Focusing on the ways that both Victorian literature and modern social thought responded to an emergent "society of strangers," The Comfort of Strangers argues for a new relation between literary form and the socially dense environments of modernity, insisting upon strangers in these works not as alienating, fearsome others, but a relatively banal yet transformative fact of everyday life, the dark matter of the nineteenth-century social universe.

Taking up "the literature of social density," Gage McWeeny engages with a range of generically diverse works from the age of Victorian sympathy to illuminate surprising investments in ephemeral relations, anonymity, and social distance. Life amidst strangers on urban streets and markets produced new social experiences, both alluring and fearsome, and McWeeny shows how realist literary form is remade by the relational possibilities offered by the impersonal intimacy of life among those unknown and the power of weak social ties. Reading works by Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, he discovers a species of Victorian sociality not imagined under J.S. Mill's description in On Liberty of society as a crowd impinging upon the individual. Instead, McWeeny mines nineteenth-century literature's sociological imagination to reveal a set of works diverted by and into intensities located in strangers and the modern forms of sociality they emblematize.

Treating seriously the preference for the many over the few, the impersonal intimacy of strangers over those who are friends and acquaintances, The Comfort of Strangers shows how literature and sociology together produced modern understandings of the social, opening up canonical works of the nineteenth century to a host of strange, new meanings.

The Comfort of Strangers

Social Life and Literary Form

Gage McWeeny

The Comfort of Strangers

Social Life and Literary Form

Gage McWeeny

Author Information

Gage McWeeny is Professor of English at Williams College.

The Comfort of Strangers

Social Life and Literary Form

Gage McWeeny

Reviews and Awards

"...the real thrust of the book is not really historical, but rather theoretical. The core contention is that Arnold, Eliot, Wilde, and James theorize the social in complex and compelling ways, and those ways affect the formal patterns in their art. That claim seems interesting and important regardless of whether it is the product of the rise of a new kind of society in the nineteenth century. And if the current turn toward presentism in Victorian studies ends up changing the field, perhaps at least one of the changes it might induce would be a willingness to take such claims seriously in their own right." --Patrick Fessenbecker, Victorian Studies

"And McWeeny makes a fine case for this distortion in George Eliot's Middlemarch, which seems to be aimed at reducing social complexity to lucid resolutions but which finally fails to do so...Henry James sensed such telling lapses, too, and McWeeny offers superb readings of James's shifty, anxious commentary on Eliot's novels. When James described Middlemarch as "a treasure house of details but an indifferent whole," he was assessing urban social pressure on aesthetic design. The questions James considered about the intersection of social modality and aesthetic expression also pertained to his own practice as a novelist. His later fiction emphasizing equivocal perception, responds to this new pressure of the public sphere by dramatizing a specific kind of social intimacy made possible only by its deflection into writing." --William J. Scheick, English Literature Transition 1880-1920

"A dazzling achievement. Gage McWeeny captures strangers in all their elusiveness, and, in doing so, renders the most familiar works of the Victorian period newly--startlingly--strange." --Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard University

"Faced with a Victorian literature long seen as devoted to the strong social bonds of marriage, familial relations, and sympathy, Gage McWeeny sets out to study instead the 'weak social ties' and 'stranger relations' that exerted a surprising force on Victorian imaginations. The result is an incisive, suavely-argued, and strikingly original book that promises to refresh debate on nineteenth-century literature's relations with the then-emergent discourses of modern social thought." --James Buzard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"This terrific new book shows that, although there wouldn't seem to be much to say about strangers (where's the fun in talking about the people you don't know?), their often unacknowledged presence at the edges of thought in fact exerts immense pressure on the forms of Victorian literature and culture. Revealing the plain fact of other people as a roar on the other side of sociability, The Comfort of Strangers forces us to see the strong force of the weak social ties that linked literary representation to everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain." --Kent Puckett, University of California, Berkeley

"In this gracefully written and richly suggestive study of the power of weak social ties, Gage McWeeny shows just how often, and in what a wide range of contexts, Victorian writers put aside questions of personal intimacy or emotional intensity in order to explore the value--and the pleasures--of encountering all the many people one can never know except as strangers." --Stephen Arata, University of Virginia

"...insightful..." Choice